A unified communication (UC) solution can support convergence and integration of a voice, a video, an instant message, status presence, and a conference and build a brand new enterprise communication solution for enterprises by coordination of multiple types of terminals, such as a fixed-line phone, a mobile phone, a computer, and a tablet computer, such as an iPAD. The status presence, as a key component of the UC solution, draws wider concerns from the enterprises. An enterprise user may learn about, according to a status presence function, current status of a terminal of a user whom the enterprise user needs to contact, to help the enterprise user select an optimal contact means to quickly find the user whom the enterprise user needs to contact. With ever-increasing user communications devices, the UC solution needs to support presentation, among users within an enterprise, of status of multiple terminals.
A technical solution in the prior art is, when status of multiple terminals needs to be updated among users, status subscription is performed successively according to a terminal identifier of each terminal. FIG. 1 is a schematic flowchart of a terminal status subscription method. As shown in FIG. 1, for example, if user B has three terminals that are separately represented as B1, B2, and B3, and user A and user C need to obtain status of the three terminals of user B, a terminal of user A needs to separately send three subscription messages to a presence server in order to separately subscribe to the status of the three terminals, B1, B2, and B3. Similarly, user C also needs to send three subscription messages to the presence server. When status of any one of the three terminals, B1, B2, and B3, changes, the corresponding terminal of user B publishes new status to the presence server using a publish message, and then, the presence server notifies the new status to the terminal of user A and a terminal of user C using a change notification message. When user A has N terminals, and the N terminals all need to display the status of the three terminals of user B, user A needs to execute 3N subscription operations in a case in which only the terminals of user A display the status of the terminals of user B.
Therefore, a disadvantage in the prior art lies in that a subscription terminal needs to separately subscribe to status of a to-be-subscribed-to terminal, and user operation complexity is increased, and when a quantity of users are increased in a system, and a quantity of terminals of each user are also increased, user operation complexity is further increased.